Maybe that’s because you’re thinking about emotion in the context of feelings rather than motivation.

And that would definitely be confusing, because it’s not feelings you’re after. In fact, provoking feelings can kill the sale instead of prompting it.

Nothing more than feelings … (fail)

Feelings are magnified, messy, and often misunderstood forms of emotion, and that makes playing with them potentially dangerous. What we’re trying to do is motivate people to do something very specific (buy) … not get them to weep, fly into a rage, or jump for joy.

This may be why so many people doubt that we make purchase decisions via emotion. We don’t always detect a strong feeling when we reach for our wallets, so we must be acting from a purely logical standpoint, right?

Not likely.

You simply justify your existing desire to purchase with logic. You’ve already decided you want it. It’s still possible to talk yourself out of it, but the motivation to buy was put in place while your logical brain was making other plans.

In fact, any time we are motivated to do anything, emotion is pulling the strings. It’s just usually an emotional response lower than what we think of as a feeling, so we experience our motivations as mostly rational.

But it’s emotion that moves us to act. In fact, the Latin root for the word emotion means “to move,” because emotions motivate what we do. Psychologists will tell you that motivations are fairly simple and straightforward, while feelings can be quite complicated (we even lie to ourselves about them).

When it comes to getting someone to buy, you’re definitely invoking emotion — and when you understand emotional response in terms of motivation rather than feelings, you’ll have a better idea of how to craft your copy.

More than a feeling: motivation

So, again … the goal is not to get someone to necessarily feel. Your goal is to get someone to want, and to act on that want. If that seems like a subtle difference (since desire can often be a very tangible emotion), well at least now you accept that emotion is driving the train.

In terms of motivation, psychologists know that emotions result in one of three basic categories of responsive motivation:

Approach

When approach motivation kicks in, you want to experience or discover more of something. Approach motivation involves positive desire, and the perceived value of what you move toward always increases.

Approach motivation makes selling high-quality, desirable products easy, whether it be an iPhone or black granite kitchen countertops. But it can also be used to sell desirable outcomes, including “get rich quick” and “get skinny now” products of dubious effectiveness.

Avoid

You want to play upon avoid motivation when your prospect wants to get away from something of low value. Avoid motivation deems something unworthy of attention, and an inconvenience or annoyance that should be ignored or eliminated.

People want to avoid paying too much on their electric bill more than any desire for features of the juice coming through the wires, unless you’re using alternative energy sources, in which case many will do business with you to avoid adverse environmental impact.

Most charities play on avoidance emotions to lessen the impact of poverty, disease, and natural disasters. Rather than taking a beauty approach, Clearasil plays on motivations to avoid the stigma of acne.

Attack

With attack motivation, people want to devalue, insult, criticize, or destroy something. When someone is emotionally motivated to eliminate something (rather than simply avoid it), attack motivation is the way to go.

Think about ad campaigns for weed killer and bug spray (Raid kills bugs dead!). Likewise, we’ve seen more than our share of large-scale campaigns designed to eradicate various complicated problems by waging war against them — the war on crime, drugs, terror, etc.

What’s my motivation?

By using the three basic categories of emotional motivation, you should be able to craft the right kind of story to get people to take action. The problem comes when you’re not clear which motivations you’re actually playing to.

For example, it’s rare that an attack against your competitor will work on the basis of attack motivation, but comparative advertising (Pepsi challenge, Mac Guy and PC guy) can work if you invoke enough approach motivation due to the expressed benefits and differentiation.

On the other hand, negative political ads work on independents not by triggering attack motivation, but instead by prompting avoidance … the undecided voter doesn’t want to make the wrong choice.

Thinking in terms of motivation makes selling with emotion a little less mysterious. And spending the time to truly know who your prospects are makes motivation crystal clear.

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Reader Comments (41)

Thank you for this excellent presentation. One thing I really notice a great deal of with small businesses is overall neutrality in the sales approach. Kind of playing it safe. It’s easy to take that route, but it’s also easy to have potential customers lose interest fast. The other end of the scale is trying to hard which has the same effect.

To me, the business that takes the most effective sales approach is the business that’s also interested in the customer’s best interests. You have to be in tune with what the customer wants to key in on the right motivation. Hopefully in that case the product follows through!

Realizing that you decide what to do and then justify it after the fact is very disconcerting, because it doesn’t feel like that from the inside. But it’s been backed up by all sorts of science (as if Brian’s word wasn’t enough), including fMRI scans.

For me, the book Prometheus Rising was where I first learned about this. The book explores it from the other angle — from the point of view of a person trying to figure out their own true motivations and choose their own actions instead of acting out of habit, pattern, or after-the-fact justifications.

And you know, now that I think about it, I see how I’ve been subtly applying the insights of Prometheus Rising in marketing all along. I guess understanding how brains work has many useful applications. (:

Great article, but this typo distracted me (not that it would be difficult…)

“With attack motivation, people want to devalue, insult, criticize, or destroy something. When someone is emotionally motivated to eliminate ***somehting*** (rather than simply avoid it), attack motivation is the way to go.”

People want to feel, but they want to feel it themselves. And don’t want people who try to push them around this. Thats the reason they buy, we can just give them the motivation to go ahead and feel what they want to feel.

Thanks Brian! This is the first time I’ve read about the difference between feelings and motivation.

I’ve always thought of emotional response as a feeling. Partly due to what I’ve learned about “Pain” and “Pleasure”.

Come to think of it, Approach Motivation would be like “Pleasure” and Avoidance Motivation would be like “Pain”. But to think of them in terms of motivation and not just feelings really clears the air for me.

Insightful post. I think you’ve made a lot of people realise the differences in the buying techniques. Like others have also expressed, I was the same in confusing the two aspects of emotion and feelings, so you have clarified things for many of us.

Very true. I have found even when individuals try to remove the emotion from their decision (such as quantifying their decisions through a formalized decision matrix or comparison table), in the end it always comes down to the individual’s feeling about the product or service. In the end if you believe your decision is unemotional (even if quantified) you are just fooling yourself!

This post reminds me of one of the very first marketing lessons I took a long time ago. AIDA –> Attraction , Interest, Desire, Action which will bring you to the next level AICDA –> Attraction, Interest, COMPREHENSION, Desire and Action.

I had also thought in terms of “pain/away from” and “pleasure/towards” motivation but not about “attack”, so that was interesting, thank you. Even people who feel good while they buy, and dull afterwards (buyer’s remorse) tend not to think any emotion has been involved .. only copywriters know!

After selling stuff both online and in person for over 9 years, I can say that people buy based on emotion and then justify their purchase with facts, so it’s important to give both. But it really is that simple. The reason we hear it over and over again is because it’s just the way it is.

Trying to sharpen my copywriting skills (well get some LOL) and I enjoyed this post =) Gave me some stuff to think about! I would love to see more details on the 3 categories to help us along; like more examples, ‘scripts’ if you will – not necessarily ‘here copy this and use it’ but ways one can write using each approach, etc. =)

It’s made me think how I approach the writing I do for my customers and how I’ve been using these without really understanding them. Such as the approach motivation when crafting a page title and meta description to entice a searcher to click on my clients search result.

Will be interesting to see how I can use the attack and avoid motivations in a similar way.

This is educative and well research material, when you’re in engaging in MLM, you will need go an extra mile to engage your prospects; that’s where relationship marketing becomes relevant to network marketing.

This is a very interesting read. However, when it comes to whether or not I buy something, a lot of the time it depends on the transparency of the company. If I can’t tell what’s in the product or whether or not the company shares the same values I do, I won’t buy from them.

I have a digital product I was able to set up with a Singaporian online friend. We created an eBook in our niche. The book was fully loaded with contents for online entrepreneurs, I mailed some copies to my friends for review and they loved it. I have since made it available for purchase on my Facebook page but yet to make a sale.

Afetr reading your article, I thought it might be wise if I changed the sales letter page of the eBook, maybe add something that is more emotional.

Although the article focuses on emotions related to the buying process, what we experience (emotions and feelings) still goes mostly in the subconscious level, and one concrete way to change this, is to be aware of what we are feeling, that is, to be able to name the experience we are having right now.

In that sense, simply knowing the name of emotions and feelings is a great help to have a richer emotional life. If we know what we are feeling, (and how that feels) we’ll have much more information to decide what to do next (approach or avoid for example).

I gathered a list of more than 250 emotions and feelings in Spanish, but I know that in German there a lot more than that, as it has more precision in this field.